Politics & Power Quote by Auberon Herbert

Herbert doesn’t dress this up as a tragic flaw of “some” leaders; he frames it as the operating system of politics itself. The bluntness is part of the argument. By reducing the “ruling idea” to a single predatory instinct, he strips away the civics-class halo around public service and recasts the politician as an instrument of compulsion: someone who looks at dissenters and sees raw material.

The key move is the inversion of moral standing. In liberal rhetoric, opponents are fellow citizens to be persuaded, bargained with, or tolerated. Herbert’s politician treats them as means, not ends. That phrasing lands with almost clinical precision because it exposes what power does to imagination: once you can force outcomes, other people’s autonomy becomes an inconvenience to be managed. The line “if he can get power enough” is the quiet tell. Herbert isn’t claiming every officeholder is a cartoon villain; he’s arguing that the logic of political machinery rewards the expansion of leverage, and that leverage naturally seeks new objects.

Context matters: Herbert was a late-Victorian classical liberal and anti-statist, writing in an era when modern bureaucracy, mass parties, and imperial confidence were hardening the state into something more permanent and ambitious. His suspicion isn’t merely about corruption; it’s about structure. Give politics the authority to compel, and it will keep finding “ends” grand enough to justify the coercion. Opposition, in that worldview, isn’t a constituency to represent; it’s a problem to solve.